نشانه شناسی ، نمادها و بومی زبان

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Semiotics, Symbols, and Vernacular

Can you hear me now?

We communicate with symbols. The letters “C-A-R” aren’t an icon of a car, or a picture of a car. They’re a stand-in, a symbol that, if you know English, brings to mind a car.

Nike spent billions of dollars to teach millions of people that the swoosh is a symbol of human possibility and achievement, as well as status and performance.

And, if you’re a designer, the typeface comic sans is a symbol of bad taste, low status, and laziness.

Marketers have the humility to understand that not everyone sees a symbol the same way, the awareness to use the right symbol for the right audience, and the guts to invent new symbols to be placed on top of old ones.

A hundred years ago, semiotics was in its infancy. It wasn’t something done by a billion people a day, every day, as we market to each other online. Now, our ability to do this with intent (or with naïve intuition) can make the difference between success and failure.

What does this remind you of?

Busy people (you know, the kind of people you seek to change) don’t care about your work as much as you do. They’re not as up to date as you are, or as aware of the competitive landscape or the drama behind the scenes.

We scan instead of study.

And when we scan, we’re asking, “What does this remind me of?”

This means that the logo you use, the stories you tell, and the appearance of your work all matter. Your words resonate with us, not only because of what they mean, but because of how they sound and how you use them.

It’s not just the stuff. It’s even the way you set up the room for your company off-site.

If it reminds us of a high school cafeteria, we know how to act. If it’s a bunch of round tables set for a chicken dinner, we know how to act. And if there are row upon row of hotel-type chairs in straight lines, we know how to sit and act glazed.

We don’t care about you, or how hard you worked on it. We want to know if it’s for us, and if you’re the real deal.

This is semiotics. Flags and symbols, shortcuts and shorthand.

Do the flashing lights at an arena rock concert change the way the music sounds? Perhaps they do, because they remind us we’re at an arena rock concert.

When we hold a newspaper, it feels different than a tablet, or a comic book, or a Bible. The form changes the way the words sound.

A chocolate bar presents itself differently than a chemotherapy drug.

When we walk into a medical office that feels like a surgeon’s office, we remember how that surgeon helped us . . . even if this office belongs to a chiropractor.

When we pick up a book that feels self-published, we treat it differently than the book that reminds us of a classic we read in high school.

When we get a phone call and hear the telltale clicks and pauses before the stranger begins to speak, we remember all the robocalls and phone spam we’ve gotten and hang up before the caller even utters a word.

And when the website is designed with GeoCities and flashing GIFs . . .

If you remind me of a scam, it will take a long time to undo that initial impression. That’s precisely why so many logos of big companies look the same. It’s not laziness. The designers are trying to remind you of a solid company.

That’s the work of “reminds me of.” You can do it with intent.

Hiring a professional

The internet is littered with websites, emails, and videos made by amateurs. Amateurs who made something that they liked.

Which is fine.

But what a professional does for you is design something that other people will like. They create a look and feel that reminds people of their sort of magic.

There’s not one professional look, not one right answer. A summer blockbuster gives itself away in four frames of film—it’s clearly not a YouTube video from a teen makeup guru.

Every once in a while, the amateur happens to find a vernacular that reminds the right people of the right story. The rest of the time, it’s best to do it with intent.

Imagine that world . . .

Don LaFontaine made more than five thousand movie and TV voice-overs. It’s not because he was more talented at speaking than anyone else, or because he was the cheapest. It’s because his head start compounded, and if a studio chief wanted to remind the audience of a big-time movie, his voice could do that, precisely because he was reminding you of his earlier work.

It’s important to remember that it doesn’t matter what you, the marketer who created it, is reminded of. Semiotics doesn’t care who made the symbol. The symbol is in the mind of the person looking at it.

And it’s even more important to remember that there’s no one right answer. The symbol that works for one group won’t work for another. In Silicon Valley, the hoodie is a symbol of status (I’m too busy to go clothes shopping). In a different context, though, for a different audience, a hoodie in East London might put someone on alert instead of reassuring them.

Why is Nigerian spam so sloppy?

If you’ve gotten an email from a prince offering to split millions of dollars with you, you may have noticed all the misspellings and other telltale clues that it can’t possibly be real.

Why would these sophisticated scammers make such an obvious mistake?

Because it’s not for you. Because they’re sending a signal to people who are skeptical, careful, and well-informed: go away.

The purpose of the email is to send a signal. A signal to the greedy and the gullible. Because putting anyone else into the process just wastes the scammer’s time. They’d rather lose you at the beginning than invest in you and lose you at the end.

The flags on SUVs are called flares

In 2018, the more expensive a car is, the more likely it is to have slightly exaggerated flares around the wheels.

These flares are easier to make than they used to be (robots bending steel), but they remain a signifier. A message about the status of the car and its driver.

They have no real function. The flare is more than six inches away from the wheel. But they remain.

And in the aftermarket, you can pay extra for an even bigger flare, sort of surgical augmentation for your car.

Do that too much and your status goes down with most bystanders, not up. Just as it does with plastic surgery.

The Cadillac XTS goes even further. There is a tiny flare on the back of each tail light. Again, no useful purpose, except to remind some people, just a bit, of the Batmobile (or the 1955 Lincoln Futura).

These flags of status are everywhere we look.

Alex Peck points out that driving gloves have a big hole in the back. Why? Perhaps it’s left over from when men with cars wore big watches, and the glove needed a hole to give the watch a place to poke through.

Over time, we forgot the big watch and just kept the hole. It’s a symbol.

These leftover utilities have become symbols, and once a symbol becomes well known (like the tiny details on an Hermès handbag) it’s quickly copied, manipulated, and spread, until it ceases to be scarce and then becomes merely a signal of changing taste.

What’s your flag? Why would someone fly it?

The flag is not for everyone

It’s worth restating that the smallest viable market gives you the freedom to pick those you seek to serve. And those people are seeking a certain symbol. It’s likely, if you’ve chosen the market well, that the symbol they seek is quite different from one that would work for a larger audience.

There’s a paradox here. If we want to make change, we need to go first, hanging over one edge or another. But often, that innovation reminds (some) people of a past event that went wrong. We begin by serving an audience that’s okay with that, because it’s the only audience that will give us a chance with our new thing.

Send a signal that feels like a sign we already trust, then change it enough to let us know that it’s new, and that it’s yours.

The same and the different

Most car ads look the same. That’s because the sameness sends a signal about the car being worth considering, a safe alternative for such a huge investment.

Fashion ads in Vogue look nothing like the ads in Field & Stream or Sports Illustrated. Why? The vernacular matters. You’re not people like us if you don’t talk (talk means typefaces, photo styles, copy) the way we expect you to.

This is what a good designer offers you. The chance to fit in.

And sometimes, you might choose to hire a great designer instead. Someone who can break the expectation and talk differently, but not so differently that you don’t resonate with those you seek to connect with.

When ad legend Lee Clow took the imagery from George Orwell’s 1984 to create the most iconic TV commercial of all time, almost no one watching Apple’s Super Bowl ad understood all of the references. (They’d read the book in high school, but if you want to impact a hundred million beer-drinking sports fans, an assigned high school book is not a good place to start.) But the media-savvy talking heads instantly understood, and they took the bait and talked about it. And the nerds did, and they eagerly lined up to go first.

The lesson: Apple’s ad team only needed a million people to care. And so they sent a signal to them, and ignored everyone else.

It took thirty years for the idea to spread from the million to everyone, thirty years to build hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap. But it happened because of the brilliant use of semiotics, not technology. At every turn, Apple sent signals, and they sent them in just edgy enough words, fonts, and design that the right people heard the message.

Case Study: Where’s Keith?

Not all semiotics are benign. When Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer started their site Witchsy.com, they had trouble getting their emails answered. They created a third partner, a fictional guy named Keith, gave him an email address, and had him initiate and participate in email threads.

This simple shift exposed a shameful gap in how our society treats women and men. Emails from “Keith” were quickly responded to. Vendors, developers, and potential partners were more likely to get back to Keith, addressed him by name, and were more helpful, they reported to Fast Company.

We’re judging everything, and people are judging us in return. Often, those judgments are biased, incorrect, and inefficient. But denying them doesn’t make them disappear.

The marketer can use symbols to gain trust and enrollment, or find that those symbols work in the opposite direction. To change the culture, we have no choice but to acknowledge the culture we seek to change.

That doesn’t mean giving up, fitting in, or failing to challenge injustice. But it does require us to focus our stories and symbols with intent. Who’s it for? What’s it for?

We add the flags with intent

The semiotic flags we choose to fly are up to us. Not flying one is as intentional as flying one.

The people you are seeking to serve are trying to figure out who you are. If you’re going to show up in their world, make it easy for them to know who you are and where you stand.

The lazy thing to do is insist that you don’t need a flag (or a badge). That you don’t have to nod your head to the cultural memes that came before, or even wear a uniform.

The foolish thing to do is pretend your features are so good that nothing else matters.

Something else always matters.

Are brands for cattle?

What’s your brand?

Hint: it’s not your logo.

In a super-crowded world, with too many choices (more than twenty kinds of toner to choose from for my laser printer, and more than nineteen thousand combinations of beverages at Starbucks) and with just about everything “good enough,” you’re quite lucky if you have a brand at all.

A brand is a shorthand for the customer’s expectations. What promise do they think you’re making? What do they expect when they buy from you or meet with you or hire you?

That promise is your brand.

Nike doesn’t have a hotel. If it did, you would probably have some good guesses as to what it would be like. That’s Nike’s brand.

If you have true fans, the only reason you do is because this group has engaged with you in a way that signals that they expect something worthwhile from you next time. That expectation isn’t specific; it’s emotional.

A commodity, on the other hand, has no brand. If I’m buying wheat by the ton or coffee by the pound or bandwidth by the GB, I don’t have any expectations other than the spec. Get me exactly what I got yesterday, faster and cheaper, and I’ll pay you for it.

How do we know that brands like Verizon and AT&T are essentially worthless? Because if we switched someone from one to the other, they wouldn’t care.

If you want to build a marketing asset, you need to invest in connection and other nontransferable properties. If people care, you’ve got a brand.

Does your logo matter?

It matters less than your designer wants it to, but more than the typical committee realizes.

If a brand is our mental shorthand for the promise that you make, then a logo is the Post-it reminder of that promise. Without a brand, a logo is meaningless.

Here’s a simple exercise:

Make a list of five logos you admire. As a consumer of design, draw or cut and clip five well-done logos.

Got ‘em?

Okay, here’s my prediction: each one represents a brand you admire.

Almost no one picks a swastika or the clever glyph of the bank who ripped them off. That’s because logos are so wrapped up in the brand promise that we imbue them with all the powers of the brand, ignoring the pixels involved.

Yes, it’s possible for a terrible logo to adorn a fabulous brand (complicated mermaid, anyone?). Many of the best brands have no identifiable or memorable logo (Google, Sephora, and Costco come to mind). And of course, a quick glance at your Helvetica clip sheet shows that most brands couldn’t be bothered: No, you shouldn’t phone it in or be careless. No, you shouldn’t choose a logo that offends or distracts people. Yes, you should pick a logo that works in different sizes in different media.

But mostly . . . pick a logo, don’t spend a ton of money or have a lot of meetings about it, and keep it for as long as you keep your first name.